Functionally, the operation of C News is very much like that of B News. One major difference was that C News was written with portability in mind. It ran on many variants of Unix and even MS-DOS. The relaynews program that handled article filing and feeding was carefully optimized and designed to process articles in batches, while B News processed one article per program invocation. The authors claimed that relaynews could process articles 19 times as quickly as B News.

In 1992, Collyer gave C News a new index facility called NOV (or News Overview). This allowed newsreaders to rapidly retrieve header and threading information with relatively little load on the server. Virtually all current[update] news servers continue to use this method in the form of the NNTPXOVER command. Development of C News stopped about 1995, and the package was largely superseded by INN.